False Fears About a Nuclear Iran

Stupid it may be, but it's also the hottest trend since theiPhone. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last year that if Iranproceeds toward acquiring a nuclear arsenal, "we will take whateversteps are necessary to stop it." Israeli Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu has said the same thing.

The Republican presidential candidates (except Ron Paul) strainto outdo each other in bellicose rhetoric. Mitt Romney says, "Ifyou elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."Newt Gingrich promises, "Iran is not going to get a nuclearweapon." Rick Santorum is prepared to bomb Iranian nuclearsites.

The United States and Israel are keeping theirpowder dry, but that could change anytime. A report in TheWashington Post said, "Panetta believes there is a stronglikelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May, orJune."

The prevailing wisdom among policymakers, in short, bears aneerie resemblance to the Iraq consensus of 2002. We and theIsraelis allegedly faced an intolerable peril from a rogue statewith weapons of mass destruction and a lust for aggression.Fortunately, we were told, it was nothing that a short, suddenmilitary attack wouldn't solve.

But in Iraq, it turned out the solution was anything but quickor easy—and the danger was vastly exaggerated. And in Iran?Ditto.

"The working assumption that it is possible to totally halt theIranian nuclear project by means of a military attack isincorrect," Dagan recently told The New York Times. "Thereis no such military capability. It is possible to cause a delay,but even that would only be for a limited period of time."

Another prominent Mossad veteran, Rafi Eitan, said the attackwould delay Iran's nuclear program "not even three months."

Americans may be led to assume we will pay no price. But Iranhas innumerable options for "asymmetric" retaliation—attacking ourships in the Persian Gulf, sponsoring terrorism in Afghanistan orthe United States, and ordering its Lebanese Hezbollah ally to rainrockets on Israel. We may find that fighting a war with Iran islike making love to a gorilla: You don't stop when you're done; youstop when the gorilla is done.

Why is everyone so eager to plunge into another war? Because ofanother false fear: that a nuclear-armed Iran will use its newarsenal to obliterate the Jewish state or bully its neighbors.

This panic requires a total disregard for everything we havelearned during the nuclear age. Over the past 60 years, assortedenemies and rivals have acquired nuclear stockpiles: the SovietUnion, China, Pakistan and North Korea. All of them have learnedthat they are useless as offensive weapons against other nuclearstates and their allies.

The reason is simple: Any nation that carries out a nuclearattack assures itself of cataclysmic retaliation. You can't win anuclear war. You can only lose one.

Alarmists claim the past is irrelevant because the mullahs inTehran are an entirely different enemy: willing to accept nationalannihilation for the brief pleasure of erasing Israel. But if theIranians were bent on mass martyrdom, they could have found asimpler way.

The incineration of Israel could be done with conventionalweapons—remember what the U.S. did to Dresden and Tokyo?—which arefar easier to acquire in bulk than nukes. For some reason, Iran haspassed on this option.

China was equally terrifying back when it was developing nuclearweapons. The dictator Mao Zedong declared, "We are prepared tosacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the worldrevolution." President Kennedy, however, wisely rejected apreemptive attack.

North Korea provoked intense anxiety when it built the bomb. Butin the ensuing years, it has been no more or less intractable orbelligerent than before.

Alarmists insist that an Iranian bomb would set off a regionalarms race, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey hastening to gettheir own. But they already face a worrisome neighbor with anuclear arsenal: Israel. None has seen the need for a comparabledeterrent.

The world has seen the rise of one nuclear state after anotherwithout the outbreak of nuclear war or nuclear blackmail. Yet thisone, we are told, will change the world in ways we cannot tolerate.We've heard that warning before. It's still wrong.